Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tampa was officially incorporated as the Village of Tampa on the 18th of January 1849. It was reincorporated as a town on the 15th of December 1855, and the name was shortened from Tampa Town to simply Tampa that same year.
Vicente Martinez Ybor founded Ybor City after the Tampa Board of Trade persuaded him to move his cigar manufacturing operations from Key West to Tampa in 1885. Ybor City's factories rolled their first cigars in 1886, and Tampa eventually became known as the Cigar Capital of the World.
The Gasparilla Pirate Festival is a mock pirate invasion and parade held in Tampa nearly every year since 1904. It was founded by a civic association of local businessmen called Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, named after the mythical local pirate Jose Gaspar. The parade draws over 400,000 attendees and is the third largest parade in the United States.
MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa hosts the headquarters of United States Central Command, described as the most important military headquarters after the Pentagon. The base is the parent installation for over 15,000 active military, civilian, and contractor personnel in the Tampa Bay area and also houses the headquarters of United States Special Operations Command.
Tampa Bay is considered one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to a direct major hurricane because a century of population growth and coastal development has dramatically increased what is at risk, and rising sea levels have compounded that exposure. No hurricane has made direct landfall in the immediate Tampa Bay area since the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane struck as a Category 3 storm near Tarpon Springs.
Champa Bay was the nickname Tampa earned after all three of its major professional sports teams qualified for their sport's championship series between September 2020 and July 2021. The Tampa Bay Lightning won back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021, the Tampa Bay Rays reached the 2020 World Series, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won Super Bowl LV at Raymond James Stadium - the first home-game victory in Super Bowl history.